Category: Field Reports

Ali Akbar Khan Photo courtesy The Ali Akbar College of Music

It was sad news to hear that sarod master and icon of Indian music Ali Akbar Khan had died, and on my birthday no less, June 18. I first heard his music as a small child growing up in Los Angeles in the early sixties. I remember my South Indian father being so excited to get hold of LPs of music from his country of origin, balanced by the exact opposite reaction from my American mother who couldn’t abide the whiny sound of the instruments. I have to admit that at first I sided with my mother, who not only raised me but also was responsible for putting a violin in my hands. But I do remember that one particular record—East Meets West—had violinist Yehudi Menuhin on it, which did make a more favorable impression on me.

When the Beatles went into their psychedelic Eastern obsession phase, I was in my early teens and was looking to rock music for identity, so naturally I developed some curiosity about those old Indian music recordings my dad had laying around. But even then it was more the sitar of Ravi Shankar that I was attracted to. The sarod sounded too much like a bizarre version of a banjo, and in those days I was definitely not interested in anything remotely related to hillbilly music (that came later in a big way!).

A trip to India I took with my father, my first time there actually, in the late seventies, sparked my interest in studying Indian music. To my great surprise, the musicians I spoke with in New Delhi told me the best place to study was all the way back home in the San Francisco Bay Area—at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music in San Rafael. I filed that information away, returned to the United States, and didn’t think about it again until a couple of years later when I moved into an apartment in San Anselmo that happened to be just five minutes away from the college.

At that point in my musical development I was still in the “establishing fundamentals” phase, although I wouldn’t have been able to see that at the time—I was too busy enjoying myself, having by then wiggled my way into the new acoustic music scene dominated by the David Grisman Quintet. A bad-boy-wannabe-blues-rock-garage band violinist in high school, I had polished my skills in classical violin and composition in my undergraduate work, followed by four years of intense study of bebop jazz. Along the way, I fell in love with Grisman’s Dawg music which opened yet another door into the American string band music tradition. (Who knew that the banjo could be so hip?) I was even getting the odd chance to jump onstage with Grisman’s band, especially exciting since in those days he had hooked up with the gold standard of jazz violin, Stephane Grappelli. Being part of that just blew my young head off completely. I was quite full of myself when I look back! But I had no serious understanding of the music of my paternal ancestry, and felt that lack quite strongly.

Before my Grisman-obsessed days I was an equally maniacal devotee of the music of John McLaughlin, starting with his seminal jazz-rock group the Mahavishnu Orchestra—with rock violinist Jerry Goodman, later replaced by the modern generation jazz violin icon, Jean-Luc Ponty—and then came Shakti, the first Indian fusion supergroup. The tabla player was Zakir Hussain, son of the tabla player Alla Rakha, who was on pretty much all of those early recordings my dad had of Ali Akbar Khan. At least that is my memory. Plus the astounding Carnatic violinist L. Shankar, once again radically altering my concept of what the instrument was capable of. All of this set the stage for my finally taking the plunge and undertaking serious studies at the Ali Akbar Khan College—which I attended for about three weeks before I landed a five-night-a-week gig at a night club and that was that.

During those three weeks, however, I was fortunate to have the chance to study directly with Ali Akbar Khan, or Khan Sahib, as his students knew him. What an amazing experience! When giving his evening classes in raga, he didn’t talk much about theory or anything too conceptual—most of what we did was ear training call and response. I was very proud that I could follow reasonably well, enough so that it seemed to me he was directing his lines towards me to see how much I could keep up. Inevitably there was the moment I fell on my face, but still it seemed that the great man had taken notice of me and was impressed, which was a thrill, being so young and desperate to find my musical direction.

Of course three weeks was a pittance of time when approaching something as deep as Indian Classical music, but even so it was an experience of great value to me. Eschewing the traditional guru-disciple approach, Khan Sahib was one of the first—if not the first—to set up a system of study that followed the Western style of classroom dissemination and analysis, which gave incredible access to what had hitherto been a style one had to be born into. Through this I gained my first understanding of the Indian notation system, as well as the rhythmic cycles that dominated the structural aspects of the music. I started to get a sense of the possibilities inherent in the modal development encapsulated by the intricate system of scalar melody called raga. But maybe the most important imprint left on my bones was a deeply felt, loving respect for this ancient tradition, on par with the best the West had to offer, and as so nobly embodied by Khan Sahib, who was relentless and uncanny in his complete mastery of the North Indian style.

I reached the clarity that as much and as passionately as I loved this music, it was going to be beyond my reach no matter how hard I tried. Having not grown up grounded in the system, it was just too remote to imagine ever achieving any true fluency, just as speaking my father’s native Malayalam language was not in the cards. And dabbling was not something I was interested in, either. In the end, the need to connect to my cultural roots without losing my sense of self played out in my post-graduate composition studies with my main teacher and mentor, Allaudin Mathieu, himself a disciple of legendary Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath.

As the years went by, I would occasionally get the chance to hear Khan Sahib play in concert, and I continued to follow his recording career diligently, including a period in the mid-nineties when he experimented with his own brand of Western fusion. My former Turtle Island bandmate Irene Sazer took part in that, leading to intense jealousy on my part—sometimes life just ain’t fair!

The last time I heard the master was a couple of years ago at the ashram my wife and I attend in San Ramon. He played for Amma, also known as the hugging saint, who is the leader of the denomination we are part of. He looked so happy, especially when he got her darshan, which means being seen in the traditional sense but for Amma it means getting a hug.

I have to admit that I am glad to be a spoiled kid who grew up in the affluence of the Los Angeles suburbs, as opposed to the alternative universe of the rural village of India my father came from. I heard stories about how Ali Akbar Khan’s father, who was also Ravi Shankar’s guru, would tie him up by his hair so if he fell asleep while practicing the pain would wake him up. He went on from there to make such a huge impact on the way the world views the music of his country. What a long and amazing life Khan Sahib led!

***

David Balakrishnan, photo by Peter Serling

David Balakrishnan, violinist/composer and founder of the Grammy winning Turtle Island Quartet, graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in music composition and violin. In his subsequent postgraduate studies at Antioch University West, he developed a revolutionary compositional style—based on the principle of stylistic integration applied to bowed string instruments—that became the template for the Turtle Island approach, and earned him two Grammy nominations for his arrangements as well as numerous composing grants from prestigious organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, and the American Symphony Orchestra League. His most recent commission, from the Lied Center of Kansas, resulted in a full-length work involving theatre, dance, poetry, video, and Turtle Island with the KU wind ensemble that is an artistic response to the social issues concerning the various theories of evolution, both scientific and cultural, entitled The Tree Of Life.

In a not-so-recent musing on Thanksgiving (it is June, after all), Frank Oteri asked an interesting question: What would happen if there were one day of the year where everyone sang or played musical instruments together, just for the fun of it?

Opera on Tap performed works by Michael Rose, Daniel Felsenfeld and Jennifer Griffith in Brooklyn’s Ft Greene Park as part of the 2009 Edition of Make Music New York (photo by Jon Wasserman)

This might not be exactly what Frank had envisioned—but it gets pretty close. Once a year, on the summer solstice, amateur and professional musicians and listeners take to the streets of NYC for the simple pleasure of playing, listening to and sharing music. Twelve hours worth of musicians of all ages, creeds, and musical persuasions playing everything from hip-hop to opera to Latin jazz to punk rock, performing anywhere they can fit for whoever comes out to listen or happens to be walking by.

It’s the Make Music New York festival, which is something I’ve been involved with as the volunteer director of North Brooklyn—reaching out to the community, bringing people together, recruiting venues, recruiting performers, coordinating logistics (e.g. negotiating sound permits etc.), and working with other volunteers (the effort was all volunteer and involved many people) for the past six months or so. Make Music New York is an off-shoot of France’s La Fête de la Musique (faites de la musique—make music!). The idea was first broached in 1976 by American musician Joel Cohen, then employed by the national French radio station France Musique. Cohen proposed an all-night music celebration at the moment of the summer solstice. The idea was taken up by French Music and Dance director Maurice Fleuret for Minister of Culture Jack Lang in 1981 and first took place in 1982.

In its 28 years of existence, the concept has taken off around the world, and it is now celebrated at more than 300 locations in 100 countries, including the following American cities: Cambridge, Kalamazoo, Albion, Dallas, Miami, Pasadena, Philadelphia, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Fe, San Jose, and Washington DC.

Here’s a look at the diversity of music-making in New York—uncurated, uncensored, and open to all—this past June 21, 2009 for the third annual Make Music NY festival. What does it do for the American psyche? And does it heighten the general public’s appreciation for music overall? Judging from the turnout this year—some 900 performances despite the rain—and the smiling faces, it must be doing something, and it’s looking good.

Mass Appeal Flutes in Riverside Park (photo by Gillian DiPietro)

Mass Appeal Megaphones at Union Square (photo by Elizabeth Ferguson)

Mass Appeal Piano Block Party on Cornelia Street (Photo by Elizabeth Ferguson)

Mass Appeal Ukuleles at 66th & Broadway (photo by Greg Gatuso)

Mason Bates

Twelve days before the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition actually drew to a close in Fort Worth, a winner was declared: composer Mason Bates.

Yes, yes, the real winners of the 17 days of concerts were pianists. Two gold medals were awarded this year in a ceremony on June 7: one to Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20, of Japan and one to Haochen Zhang, 19, of China. But once again the Cliburn also held a composition competition, the American Composers Invitational, and the results for that unique race were decided when the 12 semi-finalists were named on May 27. (For a full description of how the ACI was established and the past history of new works at the Cliburn see “Composers in Cowtown.”)

Back in February in New York, composer John Corigliano chaired a jury comprised of composers Samuel Adler and Melinda Wagner and pianist Ursula Oppens, that reviewed submissions of newish piano works, between 8 and 12 minutes in length, received from 28 composers. Four finalists were selected:

Mason Bates: White Lies for Lomax
Derek Bermel: Turning
Daron Hagen: Suite for Piano
John Musto: Improvisation & Fugue

All four pieces were sent to the 30 Cliburn competitors in early March. Every competitor had to decide on one for inclusion in a recital during the semi-final rounds, should he or she make it that far. The composer whose work is performed by the most semi-finalists receives $5,000, while the others get $2,500 each.

A couple of month prior to arriving in Fort Worth each pianist submitted the complete repertoire he or she would bring to compete, and it was all printed in the mammoth program book. Your diligent reporter tallied the non-binding votes of all 30 competitors, which was as follows:

Bates: 13
Hagen: 9
Musto: 6
Bermel: 1

But it’s the choices of the semi-finalists, who actually performed the works in competition, that determines the winner of the ACI. And here’s that tally:

Bates: 7
Hagen: 4
Musto: 1
Bermel: 0

Beyond the competition’s admirable and rather clever efforts to foster new works, the majority of music performed came from Europe and the classic and romantic eras, along with a healthy dose of early 20th-century material as well (Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Prokofiev). Here’s a run-down of the contemporary or modern works from the submitted repertoire (again, not everything got played because some pianists were cut from the field before they got a chance to perform all their prepared music).

Samuel Barber: Piano Sonata Op. 26 (from three pianists)
Alban Berg: Sonata Op. 1
Pierre Boulez: Douze Notations
York Bowen: Toccata Op. 155
Aaron Copland: Piano Variations
John Corigliano: Etude Fantasy
Elliott Carter: Catenaires
Aaron Jay Kernis: Superstar Etude No. 2
Arnold Schoenberg: Klavierstücke, Op. 11
Toru Takemitsu: Rain Tree Sketches (from two pianists)
Carl Vine: Piano Sonata (1990) (from two pianists)

Of these works, two were actually performed during the final round: The Takemitsu by Evgeni Bozhanov of Bulgaria and the Schoenberg by Di Wu of China.

If there were prizes for the Cliburn competitors with the best demonstration of a commitment to contemporary repertoire (modest as it might be), they would go to Andrea Lam of Australia, who selected the Kernis and the Corigliano, and Spencer Myer of the U.S., who selected the Copland and Vine.

The award for best performance of a new work went to Tsujii, one of the gold medalists, who was the only competitor to perform the Musto piece. An audience favorite from the beginning and rare human interest story, Tsujii has been blind since birth and he learns all of his repertoire by ear. He’s said to be a talented improviser as well as an aspiring composer. During the final press conference when I asked if he had a taste for American music, he replied, through the aid of an interpreter, that he has always enjoyed jazz and meeting Stevie Wonder was the highpoint of his life, at least until winning the Cliburn gold.

John Corigliano Photo by J. Henry Fair

“This is a piece that happened only because I had to figure out how to write a piece of music in a medium that I don’t like,” John Corigliano confesses in the opening moments of his lecture “Conjurer: The Evolution of a Percussion Concerto from Drawings to Notes to Sound” (delivered at the Juilliard School on April 22, 2009).

As holder of Juilliard’s 2009 William Schuman Scholars Chair, Corigliano presents two free lectures this year. For the first—which, thanks to the Juilliard School, is made available here for on-demand streaming—Corigliano offers an in-depth look at his approach to building a piece of music. In the course of his 60-minute talk, the composer offers frank commentary, sound samples, and quite a few good jokes to colorfully illustrate how he got over the hurdles before him and constructed Conjurer, for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for Evelyn Glennie. —MS

Conjurer: The Evolution of a Percussion Concerto from Drawings to Notes to Sound

Ask Your Mama takes as its starting place the 12-part poem of the same name by Langston Hughes. The original text is actually “scored” in a fashion: Hughes made notes about cues throughout that reference music drawn from all sorts of genres–everything from gospel to progressive jazz. How did you approach the task at hand with this information already on the table? How were you best able to move inside what had already been laid out?

Before I started writing the music for Ask Your Mama, I put together what I called Hughes’ playlist—two CD’s full of his musical references which encompassed a huge stylistic range. This playlist is comprised of both the relatively specific musical references within the text and personal selections, many of which Jessye Norman and I made together, that fit Hughes’ more general suggestions. I also managed to locate an out-of-print recording of Hughes reading Ask Your Mama in that wonderful voice of his—warm, wry, poignant. These were my essential tools. This playlist became the basis of the archival sounds, triggered as samples, which come from two onstage laptops.

Hughes, as you mentioned, was very specific as to how he wanted the music to sound, often quite specifically “orchestrating” the poem and asking for very specific musical references. I followed his instructions quite directly, using a guira when he asked for it, and finding ways to make rapid stylistic changes happen. Here, being a film composer really helped, and I always found, even as a concert composer, that working within strict parameters was liberating.

For example, the first “tune” from Hughes’s playlist is the German lieder he requests along the text “YET LEONTYNE’S UNPACKING.” He later instructs, “Delicate lieder on piano continues.” When we were deciding which lieder to use, Miss Norman suggested that we find the places where her repertoire and Leontyne Price’s repertoire intersected. Out of this research, I chose Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” perfect because its pianistic opening is indeed so delicate and yet can quite easily be manipulated to sound like cool-bop. I asked Miss Norman to “scat” this piano part. I recorded her, and this sample infiltrates the work. This way of working illustrates the way that I often approached executing Hughes’s often seemingly impossible requests, while maintaining his subversive dialogue about art, race, culture, and music.

One of the great challenges of setting the text was how often Hughes calls for a TACIT. Note, “tacit” is a different spelling from the “tacet” we use in music, meaning, “do not play.” “Tacit,” according to Webster’s, means “implied or indicated (as by an act or by silence) but not actually expressed.” Very early on I developed what I affectionately call “monster rules” for the instruction of tacit. The first treatment is the obvious one. The music simply stops. This happens several times in the first movement/mood, “Cultural Exchange,” and gives a sense of a winding up, a beginning, perhaps not a smooth one. The text itself sputters out:

IN THE
IN THE QUARTER
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES.

It’s like a train leaving the station, or the wheel of time beginning to turn. Here, though, it is often rudely interrupted. As soon as something gets going, it must stop. It must hesitate, as does the lyric of “The Hesitation Blues”: “Can I get it now, or must I wait?”

My second tacit rule is to speak or sing text against un-pitched rhythm. The third is to speak or sing text without musical accompaniment.

A composer of diverse work for concert halls, theater, film, and television, you came to this project with experience working in all types of styles and situations. In what ways have you drawn on that experience as you created and produced this work?

I grew up listening to jazz and classical music, as well as a host of other sounds. My mother would alternate well-worn LP’s of Stravinsky, Bernstein, Miles Davis, and Wes Montgomery, with occasional flamenco and Hebrew folk songs. When I studied at Juilliard with Milton Babbitt by day, I would moonlight as a scat singer and pianist in jazz clubs by night. As a film composer, I am often asked to be versatile—sometimes even gymnastic—in musical thought. In Ask Your Mama, I saw the possibility of working with the most brilliant, erudite “director,” Langston Hughes.

In 2003, I wanted to make use of some Neo-noir music that I had composed for CBS, which had been deemed “too out there” for that particular project. I had been experimenting with a fusion of hip-hop, jazz, and chamber music. I now wanted to recontextualize this music and set a text for two friends of mine, a spoken word artist and a baritone. These pieces turned out to be studies for Ask Your Mama.

I heard that you did use a tone row in this piece. A nod to your one-time teacher, Milton Babbitt?

As a lifetime student of Milton Babbitt, his influence is a profound part of my musical life. Any good student of Milton Babbitt could not set a poem called 12 Moods for Jazz and not embrace his 12-tone techniques! In designing Ask Your Mama, I studied the music of Langston’s playlist, the music the poet referenced throughout the poem, and derived core motivic cells from these primary sources. I then created an all-combinatorial tone row and a vertical array, as Babbitt describes in his iconic article, “Since Schoenberg.” When I was a student studying with Babbitt, he said something which has stuck with me all of these years—he said that the music he writes is exactly as he wants his music to sound. He went on to say that if he wanted his music to sound like Renaissance counterpoint, it could within this system of composition. My “style” of composition is now, and has always been, very different from Milton’s. But his techniques have always pushed me to make more interesting choices within my own stylistic parameters.

Specifically for Ask Your Mama, I highlighted one of the references for each movement/mood, and ordered pitches within the array that I designated for each mood, based on this reference. For example, if the “mood” calls for the “Hesitation Blues”, I order the pitches within the array to reflect the order of the pitches within the tune. Using this system gives me both the freedom I need to bring Langston’s musical influences to the foreground, while adhering to a basic underlying compositional structure that holds true throughout the work.

Soprano Jessye Norman, composer Laura Karpman and conductor George Manahan.

There’s also quite a bit of new technology integrated into this work. How will this aspect play out? What does it add?

Actually, we are using a very simple and existing program—Ableton Live, originally designed for DJ’s spinning and sampling from pre-existing music. In 2005 I was commissioned by actor/singer Tonya Pinkins to create arrangements of Harold Arlen songs for a tribute to his music at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Earlier, I referred to a set of pieces I composed called The Melting Pot, works that all fused different kinds of jazz with sampling of archival musical and political samples. I wanted to be able to integrate this same approach with a live band at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

As a result of my film career, I have long enjoyed the freedom to create and manipulate recorded sounds within ProTools and Digital Performer. I wanted to bring the control of the recording studio into the vulnerability of the live performance. So I called on composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, whom I knew had worked extensively in multimedia. She immediately suggested that I try Ableton Live, an instrument that I could program to control through any midi or USB-based interface. Nora had both the skills to program Ableton and the musicality to make decisions about musical ways to trigger these samples. Notating them also became an interesting process, which we both tackled head on.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center concert was a success. I was able to groove on samples of “That Old Black Magic” and “Push de Button” live with the band, and it was a real moment of coming together of my background as a jazz musician, a concert composer, and a film composer with recording chops.

I wrote a number of pieces after 2005 that incorporated this technology, including The Transitive Property of Equality that Marin Alsop conducted at The Cabrillo Music Festival. All of this work culminated in Ask Your Mama, which undoubtedly integrates sampling in the most profound way. I think in many ways, the technology we live with today allowed me to musically interpret the poem as Hughes saw it—a multiplicity and simultaneity of American voices from many different eras.

Sampling and re-contextualizing snippets of the work of others is something often attributed to hip-hop, but I believe Hughes heard sound this way, as did Charles Ives before him, and these kinds of musical simultaneities are so much a part of an American way of hearing. As I have mentioned, there are two laptops loaded with Abelton in Ask Your Mama. I have devoted one laptop to Hughes’ voice—speaking, singing, raw and processed. The other laptop triggers other sampled sounds, most of them from the playlist—from Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson, to Bo Diddley and Cab Calloway. I have also prerecorded Miss Norman at her home, singing, scatting, forming her own chorus at times.

The Honor! Festival at Carnegie Hall is a celebration of the African American cultural legacy, but this production integrates the talents and perspectives of artists of many backgrounds. What sorts of behind-the-scenes dialogue took place surrounding issues of race and identity as you crafted the piece?

Really, there were so many discussions. Early on, Miss Norman and I said we wanted this piece to be a conversation about race through music. I believe that this text, and the conversations it provokes, are so essential to being an American. And this kind of honest discussion is the height of patriotism. Before I began composing I also met with Arnold Rampersad, Langston Hughes’s biographer, and we discussed the many complex meanings of the poem, and he shared with me that Langston collaborated with many composers of all backgrounds. I also had a wonderful and enlightening e-mail correspondence with Derrick Bell, and we discussed many of the issues in the poem.

There have been dozens of people involved in Ask Your Mama, and one of the most important parts of this project for me has been the complex and impassioned conversations that have been triggered by the poem, in creating art out of words like, “THEY ASKED ME IF MY BLACKNESS/WOULD IT RUB OFF?/I SAID. ASK YOUR MAMA.” Derrick wrote me an important email that has held true throughout the process of developing Mama: “Giving new life to Hughes Ask Your Mama is an endeavor of loving challenge. Whatever the result, I suspect that the greatest satisfaction will come from the endeavor itself.”

Ed. Note: The inevitability of the life cycle means that obituaries will always be a regular part of news coverage, but the year 2009—not yet in its ninth week—has brought an unusual amount of sad news to the music community. We’ve lost jazz great Louis Bellson (July 26, 1924 – February 14, 2009), who in his multiple roles as composer, arranger, and bandleader, not to mention as a tremendous percussion sideman, helped define swing. Joe Cuba (December 31, 1931 – February 15, 2009), the Spanish Harlem-based composer, arranger and bandleader whose boogaloos introduced a whole new rhythmic vocabulary into Latin music. New Orleans bluesman Snooks Eaglin (January 21, 1936 – February 18, 2009) promulgated a completely idiosyncratic and inimitable take on the traditional 12-bar blues. Percussionist and sound artist Max Neuhaus (August 9, 1939 – February 3, 2009) created a sound installation underneath a traffic island near Times Square which could arguably be described as the most widely heard piece of contemporary music. Conductor John McGlinn (September 18, 1953 – February 14, 2009) introduced a new generation of listeners to the original scorings and presentations of such classic Broadway musicals as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, making a statement about the importance of these seminal works that parallels what the period instrument movement did for Baroque composers. Plus saxophonist Gerry Niewood (April 6, 1943 – February 12, 2009) and guitarist Coleman Mellett (May 27, 1974 – February 12, 2009)—sidemen for Frank Sinatra and Chuck Mangione, as well as composers and bandleaders in their own right—lost their lives in the tragic crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo last month.

Add to that the deaths of two major American composers which we’ve already noted—George Perle (May 6, 1915 – January 23, 2009) and Lukas Foss (August 15, 1922 – February 1, 2009)—who, in addition to their own contributions to music, were an inspiration to several generations of composers in their role as composition teachers. Steven Rosenhaus (who studied with Perle) and Christian Carey (who studied with Foss) offer their personal reflections on their mentors.

—FJO

Troy’s New Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Photo courtesy of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Just where is the intersection of art and science? To most of us, it’s as small and instant a thing as snapping a shot with a digital camera or pressing down middle C on an electronic keyboard. Yet “At the Intersection of Art and Science” is the official descriptive slogan for something much much bigger—a mammoth new landmark in upstate New York and perhaps even in the future of the arts.

The place is EMPAC, the new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, officially opening on Friday, October 3, 2008. More than six years in the making, it is a building measuring some 220,000 square feet and costing nearly $200 million. And those are dollars from earlier in the decade. According to Curtis Priem, an entrepreneur and RPI trustee who contributed $40 million to EMPAC, it would cost about $1 billion to launch a similar undertaking today, due to the surging costs in construction, concrete, cooper and the like.

EMPAC includes four performance spaces—a 1,200 seat concert hall, a 400 seat theatre with a seven-story fly space, and two flexible “black box” spaces measuring 3,500 and 2,500 square feet respectively—plus audio and video production suites, studios for resident artists, large glass enclosed atriums, a cafe and more. Not just an arts venue, EMPAC is wired into RPI’s super computer—one of the newest and largest at any American university—and each of its large halls has been conceived and engineered to support advanced research in visualization, animation, simulation, acoustics, optics, and haptics (the study of touch). Designed by Grimshaw Architects of New York with acoustical consultation by Kirkegaard Associates of Chicago, EMPAC has advanced technologies and myriad applications said to be unparallel by any other single facility in the world.

Location, Location, Location

As EMPAC’s sleek glass building has risen out of a grassy bluff above downtown Troy, a major question has also arisen: Why is an engineering school opening an arts center? The answer lies at the heart of the tenure of RPI president Shirley Jackson, a physicist who chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for four years under President Clinton. She took the reins of the 84-year-old institution in 1999 with the intent of positioning it as a leader for 21st century technologies.

In March 2001, Jackson secured a $360 million anonymous gift to the university, which at the time was the largest single contribution ever made to a school. About half of that money went to a center for research in biotechnology, which opened on campus a few years ago. The balance has gone toward EMPAC, which has been envisioned as a place for the development of new technologies in the arts and communication and also for fostering a new kind of thinking by RPI students.

“EMPAC is both a place and a program. It is a performing arts center, a research location and agenda, a hub of campus interaction, a channel for academic programs and more—a powerful combination for art, science and engineering,” stated Jackson, to the RPI community earlier this year. “EMPAC will prepare our students for global leadership roles by exposing them to experiences which will foster innovative problems-solving, multicultural sophistication, intellectual agility, and the ability to see connections between and among disciplines across a broad intellectual front. With EMPAC our aim is create an intellectual community that did not before exist, and a cultural change at Rensselaer that will reverberate globally.”

RPI is certainly not the first university dedicated to engineering and science to expand its culture and reach. In 1969, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with a neighboring humanities school to become Carnegie Mellon University.

“We could have followed the Carnegie Mellon model and taken the price of EMPAC and built a school of humanities and social sciences,” says Samuel Heffner, chairman of the RPI board of trustees. “But this building is more than a concert hall. It’s a true laboratory and a significant move forward not only for Rensselaer but for the concept of arts and technology. EMPAC will have a long-term effect on the future of Rensselaer and will change lives.”

Grand rhetoric has certainly been flowing as EMPAC nears its opening; sometimes the language is even rather poetic.

“It’s this bridge, or it’s this river where arts and science and technology can come together and have a confluence and the highest levels of quality will meet under one roof,” says Johannes Goebel, EMPAC’s director. Goebel is a composer and was the founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, having supervised the opening of its building in 1996. For a period during the 1990s, while still at ZKM, he co-directed Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where he was also a visiting composer.

Goebel’s arrival at RPI in 2002 was certainly not the first time an artist was part of the university community. A small arts department was established in 1975, primarily as an opportunity for students to pick up some electives or participate in a performing group. In 1987, under the chairmanship of composer Neil Rolnick, the department expanded into an academic center offering the nation’s first Master of Fine Arts program in “integrated electronic arts,” wherein students developed technical skills that are applicable to multiple fields, such as music, video and gaming. A popular undergraduate degree program followed in 1996, and more recently RPI became one of the first institutions in the nation to establish a Ph.D. in electronic arts.

Under the banner iEAR (Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer), RPI has been making public presentations of up to a dozen concerts, films, demonstrations and lectures annually and has also hosted artists in residence to work at its facilities for extended periods. Among the more notable musicians presented over the years are Philip Glass, John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski, and Laurie Anderson.

Most iEAR events have taken place in the modest auditorium of RPI’s arts school, which seats a few hundred and seldom draws a full house. EMPAC, it’s worth noting, is an independent entity within RPI. The arts department remains on the other side of campus in the grand old West Hall, which was built as a hospital during the Civil War era (and is said to be haunted).

So the arts do have some established roots at the university, but given the modest draw of iEAR presentations, another question arises: Can RPI pack in audiences at EMPAC’s many halls? And what impact will EMPAC have on the larger arts scene of New York’s Capital Region, which also encompasses the cities of Albany, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs and is a short drive from the cultural Mecca of the Massachusetts’s Berkshire County.

Regarding the latter question, Goebel has stated that EMPAC will not duplicate or compete with any programming already happening in the region. But local audiences by definition have a limited amount of time and funds, if not a finite capacity for experimentation, as well.

During the mid-19th century Troy, population c. 50,000, was one of the richest cities in America due in part to its location at the meeting point of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal. Today RPI is probably the city’s largest employer. The Albany Symphony Orchestra, which often performs at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall (an acoustically acclaimed 19th century hall, also with 1,200 seats, located just a few blocks from EMPAC), already has a long history of working with living American composers. Under the ebullient leadership of music director David Alan Miller, its audiences have become accustomed, if not always fully game, to the experience of hearing new works on nearly every program. And in recent years the local gallery scene has had an upsurge in shows by local artists. But otherwise, the region is no Manhattan or Berlin with crowds eager to hang out on the cutting edge.

Yet looked at from another perspective, EMPAC is the latest link in a chain of major new contemporary arts venues that dot the Hudson Valley and extend into New England. A tour of these facilities would start 60 miles north of Manhattan in Beacon where the Dia Foundation houses its massive modern art collection in a 1929 Nabisco factory. Dia: Beacon opened in 2003. Up the Hudson River another 50 miles in the tiny town of Annandale-on-Hudson is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a sparkling and curvaceous theatre complex designed by Frank Gehry that also opened in 2003 on the campus of Bard College.

The City of Troy and EMPAC are another 58 miles further north, and then 40 miles northeast and over a mountain pass is North Adams, Massachusetts and MassMoCA, the center for new art, sculpture, and performance housed in 13 acres of former factory buildings, which opened in 1999. With the exception of Annandale-on-Hudson’s Fisher Center, each of these facilities represents a major new infusion of culture into a former industrial center. (The Fisher Center has further enhanced an already vibrant artistic scene at Bard.)

From Pre-Opening Events to There is Still Time

EMPAC has not waited for the completion of its building to start presenting events. Seeking to build its brand and engage local audiences, EMPAC has produced 50 different happenings since April 2004. Along with some lectures and film screenings, there have also been concerts with Anthony Braxton, So Percussion, and the Flux Quartet, as well as performances by Troika Ranch, Lone Twin, and Tere O’Connor Dance.

“EMPAC 360” was an outdoor performance and spectacle on the building’s construction site—highlighted by dancers repelling on its walls—in September 2005 attended by more than 2,000 people and named by the Albany Times Union as the arts event of the year. And last winter, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton bathed the construction site in color for about a month (one of the only non-theatrical projects in her long career).

While Goebel has been supervising the building’s construction and the installation of its technologies, the events have been selected and produced by a three-member artistic team: Kathleen Forde, visual arts curator, Helene Lesterlin, dance curator, and Micah Silver, music curator. The EMPAC web site lists 27 other personnel, but Goebel has estimated that a staff of at least 40 or more will be needed to run the facility. If the current web site—one week before opening night—is any indication, they are scrambling to fill more than a dozen other positions, including box office manager, production technicians, web developer, master carpenter, video engineer and director of research, among others.

Up until now, most EMPAC events have taken place in out of the way auditoriums and campus venues, but approximately 10,000 people have already attended an EMPAC presentation. That figure should easily be surpassed with the string of opening celebrations, which are spread over the first three weekends of October.

The inaugural event is a concert featuring performances by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Vox Vocal Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and pianist Per Tengstand. Other musical artists slated to appear during the opening festival are accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros (an RPI faculty member), pianist/composer Cecil Taylor, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Gamalan Galak Tika with Ensemble Robot, and pianist Ramsey Lewis. Theatrical performances will be offered by Dumb Type, Workspace Unlimited, Verdensteatret, and Richard Siegal/The Bakery. For a complete schedule of events, visit EMPAC’s website.

The kind of parallel advancement in both art and technology that EMPAC seems to be all about may be best displayed in There Is Still Time… Brother, a new 20-minute feature film scheduled to play continuously in one of the large studio spaces during the first weekend of events. Commissioned by EMPAC and produced in association with the University of New South Wales and ZKM in Germany, where it premiered last December, it is a model of how the realization of an artistic concept can lead to technological breakthroughs.

A still from There Is Still Time… Brother Image courtesy of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The film was conceived, developed and performed by the Wooster Group, the influential SoHo-based theatre collective and is shown on an extraordinary 360-degree screen. Unlike an IMAX film, which encompasses the viewer’s peripheral vision, the screen of the Interactive Panoramic Cinema literally surrounds the viewer, measuring 40 feet in diameter and 15 feet high.

To get a feel for the film’s warp-around environment, imagine a busy cafe or office with multiple conversations taking place between people sitting and standing, entering and exiting. The collage-like script, partly improvised, explores themes of war and media, with allusions to the 1959 nuclear holocaust film On the Beach and excerpts from Rosie O’Donnell’s online blog, among many other widely varied references.

Rather than being a giant sensory overload, each screening of There Is Still Time… Brother is controlled—edited, one could even say—by a single viewer in a swivel chair. Wherever he or she points the chair at any given moment, the film is clear and the audio is full, while the rest of the screen is blurred and the sound muffled. Thus, it’s impossible to grasp in one viewing every aspect of the piece and no experience of it is ever quite the same.

Though the IPA technology already existed, Goebel wanted to boost the quality of the sound for the new piece, in keeping with EMPAC’s high standards for both audio and visual production. Typical cinema sound comes from either left or right, above or below the screen. Yet this can be inexact and confusing when the screen is a wrap-around. Enter Jonas Braasch, assistant professor in the architectural acoustics program at RPI.

“With the screen that size, it becomes very important that the sound comes exactly from the same direction as the visual,” says Braasch. “In theatre production you record everything with microphones close to actors but your recording doesn’t have any information about their location. We designed a system that would record the sound and take the data of where it’s located.”

Played back through an array of 32 speakers distributed on three levels behind a new permeable screen, the dialogue in There Is Still Time… Brother will seem almost as if the actors’ voices are coming directly out of their mouths.

Braasch has written an article on his new microphone tracking system for the Computer Music Journal and is at work on a patent application. He foresees a number of other uses for the technology including for the synchronization of musical performances via the internet. Braasch came to Rensselaer in 2006 from McGill University in Montreal. EMPAC, he says, “is one of the few (electronic arts) centers that has the right balance of people involved in the arts and involved in engineering. That’s very difficult to have, without one side dominating the other.”

The creation of There Is Still Time… Brother also had an effect on its artistic team. According to Wooster Group producer Cynthia Hedstrom, EMPAC’s commission reversed the troupe’s normal approach to technology. “We tend to start with content and then find ways that technology can enhance it. Here we were starting with technology and finding content for it. That was unusual.”

The Wooster Group’s development process lasted several years but the film itself was shot in about a week. “Then, as soon as it was done, (artistic director) Elizabeth (LeCompte) says, ‘Oh, I’ve got another idea (for a 360-degree film).'” Concludes Hedstrom, “It’s fertile ground.” And that might be said not just for the technology of There Is Still Time… Brother, but perhaps for EMPAC itself.

***

Joseph Dalton Photo by Timothy Cahill

Joseph Dalton has been covering the arts scene in New York’s Capital Region for six years, primarily writing for the Albany Times Union. He is the former executive director of Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI), where he produced about 300 recordings of contemporary music. He was also director of a research project on the effects of AIDS on American music which was published in an on-line report by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS.

Rehearsing at St. Paul the Apostle

Free-jazzers and blues players; math-rock guys and punk-rock girls; grizzled Downtown veterans and still-matriculating conservatory students; fathers and sons—how Rhys Chatham’s hour-long, postiminimalist piece A Crimson Grail became such a widespread crossover attraction still eludes my full understanding.

My own involvement with it started when several people forwarded me a call for guitarists in June. Having studied guitar as a student I figured I would be qualified as a player; however, I had scarcely performed since graduation, and possessed neither the solid-body electric nor the 50-watt amp required for consideration. Sufficiently intrigued but insufficiently equipped, I misled the fine organizers at Wordless Music about the nature of my musical paraphernalia, and was rewarded for my deviousness with a selection.

The reason that I volunteered for A Crimson Grail was simple: I wanted to participate in something that I had never experienced before, and could experience in no other way. It might be plain to all who consider the prospect that playing in a huge guitar orchestra would fit that bill; what only a few realize is exactly what it feels like to outright wail in tandem with a group of that size, all parts equal in scope but individual in execution, creating a wall of sound that violates any number of city ordinances.

The piece was written for 200 guitars and 16 basses. The guitars were then further divided up into sections—soprano, alto, and tenor—which were defined by different unison tunings. As a soprano, my guitar was tuned to 4 unison high-Es with two more an octave lower. This approach allowed for a high degree of simplicity in the individual parts—almost all bar chords—while creating a shimmering immensity that would be impossible with a standard tuning. A good portion of the first rehearsal was dedicated to restringing the instruments (except for those indolent basses, which were allowed to keep their strings).

Guitars at the Altar

At the final rehearsal in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, many of the players had surreptitiously twisted the volume knobs on their amps higher and higher all night. Naïf that I am, it hadn’t even occurred to me to bring along earplugs to a rehearsal for 216 amplified instruments, and I was subsequently rendered nearly deaf by the thunderous sound of the concluding section. The notes blared up into the vaulted cathedral and mingled violently with each other, uniting together to become a truculent singular entity of—so it seemed, given the setting—inexhaustible power. There was some question as to whether we would be able to control this behemoth.

But any fears of that were unfounded. At the dress rehearsal in Damrosch Park just hours before the concert, the outdoor space allowed the powerful sound of the ensemble more space to breathe, gave its expansiveness all the room it needed to grow. It had a certain level of magic to it; a sense of the whole being even greater than its myriad parts. Amongst the players, there was consensus: we were going to kill tonight—so long as Mother Nature cooperated. Everyone was fully aware of the looming downpour, and the chance that all our best laid plans could be obliterated by gray clouds. In a fit of optimism I invited just about everyone I knew in city, but from their more objective position most of them realized the severity of the situation. Only one of them ended up coming to the concert.

It was only a half hour after our dress rehearsal—an hour and a half before the concert—that the torrents came. The hundreds of amplifiers, arrayed not underneath the overhang of the stage but in the park surrounding the audience, had to quickly be covered with tarps. Volunteers huddled with their instruments in a long nearby hallway, waiting for word. The opening act of Beata Viscera performing the music of Perotin got underway, on stage, while the rain continued to fall. The guitarists slowly moved out into the park, dumping the still accumulating water out of their seats before sitting down. We were up next.

Despite the weather, the crowd in the park was surprisingly good. On a clear day it might have approached the 10,000 people that were expected, but even in the thunderstorms, thousands still toughed it out with umbrellas in their seats. The third act, Manuel Göttsching, was bumped up ahead of us to allow more time for the weather to clear; about halfway through his set, it did. The players were optimistic, even positive, that we would play as planned, just in time to beat the 10pm curfew. Few were willing to mentally deal with the sizeable puddles that had formed all around us.

The announcement came around 9pm that there would be no performance due to the very palpable threat of electrocution. Voices raised; many of the volunteers, who had spent 20 hours of their time putting this piece together over the week, shouted out, “Let us play!” Many volunteers had skipped work, had skipped town even, coming in from across the country. It was inconceivable that we would not play that night, or that we had been turned into patient viewers and not active participants.

But no riot would form that night; after a moment the tumult died down. The 216 players turned around, picked up their equipment, and left the park with the rest of the audience.

In 2002, venture capitalist Kathryn Gould did something that probably seemed quite normal to her but that was rather unusual for the new music field. Through a program designed and carried out by Meet the Composer—an organization that encourages individuals of all sorts to involve themselves in the commissioning of new music—Gould launched Magnum Opus through which she personally funded the commission of not one, but nine new pieces for orchestra because she believed in the voices of the composers she herself had selected.

She took some heat for her gesture—fears that donors would start shaping art and redirecting the course of the field. But Gould has never been shy about confronting this attitude head on, and her confidence in her project remains so strong that she’s recently announced a second round that will fund up to ten addition orchestral works. So far five composers [Miguel de Aguila, Kenji Bunch, Avner Dorman, Lowell Liebermann, John Tavener] and five music directors and their orchestras [JoAnn Falletta (Virginia Symphony Orchestra; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra); Giancarlo Guerrero (Nashville Symphony); Jeffrey Kahane (Colorado Symphony Orchestra); Alexander Mickelthwate (Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra); Alasdair Neale (Marin Symphony)] are on board.

We had questions, Gould had answers, and while you may not agree with her choices, it’s clear that along with her cash contributions she’s investing a great deal of personal passion into the project.

Kathryn Gould

Molly Sheridan: You’ve been remarkably successful in the for-profit sector while working as one of the few female venture capitalists in the country, so I suspect you know better than most how to pick a winner, buck a trend, and face down a challenge. What has most surprised you about the way the new music field and the non-profit arts world gets things done?

Kathryn Gould: First, I was surprised by how little money there was out there for composers, particularly of orchestral music. Second, I was surprised by how few private patrons are doing anything in commissioning of orchestral music. Most of the commissions seem to come from foundations or groups of some sort. My sense is that this kind of groupthink leads to music with less style or edge. I think groups feel obligated to give everybody a chance and probably feel strange about commissioning the same person too often—even though the music might be far superior—and for that matter, probably feel strange voicing an opinion about what is, in fact, superior or not. Individuals should have none of these hang-ups—which might just lead to the commissioning of better music! I certainly felt at first that there was a fair amount of skepticism, and downright fear, about having a private person be involved in an artistic decision like whom to commission. There was much talk of the “potential lack of taste” a non-professional musician might have, fear that I would commission “movie music” (the ultimate insult for a piece, as you know).

I think the tacit assumption that the listening public doesn’t have much taste is the most concerning thing I encountered. It may even be at the root of why orchestras have continued to push some pretty weak new music on a resistant audience—trying to educate the boorish listeners who really don’t know any better. Most serious listeners are actually fairly well educated in music—know a lot, think a lot, many play music of some sort—and I think they are often underestimated. I think it should matter a lot whether the audience likes a piece of music or not. It is love for great new pieces that drives repeat performances and therefore drives the whole creative process.

I’d like to see the premiere of a new piece go back to being something important in people’s lives. And for that to happen, people have to feel like their opinion matters—and to be able to express it. Our audiences have become too polite! Perhaps I go too far—but these are thoughts I’ve had during the process of the last seven years.

MS: So in concrete terms, what do you think it would be wise to do differently?

KG: I’d like to see the professionals be more encouraging of major commissions in collaboration with patrons.

Another observation I had when suggesting composers to consider was that professionals tend a bit toward the “safe choice.” Probably not surprising given the state of finances. There was some reluctance to go outside the normal circle in selecting composers. A little bit like it was more important who you knew than what you knew. I actually felt great about this process because it got some work on the table that just wouldn’t have been there without some wacky outside influence like me.

So how do promising new composers get discovered? Difficult question. Particularly given that some of the greatest composers are not all that gregarious or self-promotional. And yet those qualities are the ones that help you get noticed in a busy world. Here again, it is private patrons that might be more likely to take the time and the risk to get off the beaten path. Would Beethoven or Tchaikovsky be noticed by today’s professionals? These guys were pretty strange, yes? Not too friendly…

MS: The new music community responds very protectively when someone calls its artistic product boring, but you haven’t been shy about the fact that you started this commissioning program specifically to combat your own frustrations with current new music trends. Has your own aesthetic opinion of the state of the field shifted at all since you’ve been researching composers for this project?

KG: I agree with much of that article! (Except about the audience being a little dumb—I don’t think so. I think they are just too polite. We have to care enough about our art to get excited about it and boo or cheer). My opinions about the field haven’t really changed. There is still only a short list of “safe choice” composers, most of whom grew up in the shadow of WWII, which has left a dark spot in music for the last 50 years. No question a lot of this music will never speak to audiences of any kind. I basically started Magnum Opus to find out why, and if there was anything to be done about it! And what I have found out is that there is something to be done, but it takes money and effort and the ability to introduce new ideas into the system. My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new music being written. Most of that music is being written outside the academic circles, it seems, and much of it by younger composers—not because they are young, but because they did not grow up with teachers who grew up in the dark musical shadow of the World Wars. For a lot of reasons the spiritual and physical dislocations of those wars destroyed art music for a long time. I think we’re over it—that’s the good news for me!—but we need to rebuild our ability to discover and perform new music of merit. I’m optimistic, but we have a lot of recent history to overcome. And yes, at concerts of the major orchestras, I do still hold my nose while the obligatory “safe choice” new music is being performed while waiting for the Brahms!

MS: Magnum Opus has focused on music for orchestras. The presentation of new music is generally not a particularly large part of an orchestra’s mission. Why concentrate this project there?

KG: A few reasons: First, I think we need to have some orchestral music of today that will stand the test of time. In order to make this happen, we actually need to create the stuff.

There are many reasons why orchestras don’t get to play much new music, but I at least wanted to remove the monetary reason for the orchestras I work with. I really do believe our century has something to say musically, but we have to nurture the process. Goodness knows I love Brahms and Berlioz with a passion, but we can’t forever just play these gems from the 19th century without hearing our own best voice. As I looked over the field, I felt that orchestral new music is where we needed the most help. New chamber music is actually in pretty fine shape. It is fairly inexpensive to get these pieces written and performed well. But orchestras—the commission is only a small part of the expense. Getting the pieces rehearsed and into the performance schedule and getting the attention of very busy music directors—this is really hard. That’s why relatively little orchestral commissioning is done, and that’s why I wanted to help.

MS: Meet the Composer is traditionally focused on composers in the United States, but previous Magnum Opus commissions have included work by non-Americans and in this round John Tavener is one of the recipients, so clearly you haven’t seen the need to restrict yourself in that way. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

KG: Absolutely. My quest was to find out if there was potentially great music being written anywhere. When we started I was a little concerned that the U.S. academic tradition might be too limiting here, so I especially wanted to explore what was going on elsewhere. It was really interesting to hear Vasks (Latvia) talk about how music was blossoming for the first time there in many years because “we have just gotten our freedom.” These positive cultural upheavals have historically enabled some fine music to come from people’s hearts and minds. I didn’t want to miss that just because it is happening elsewhere.

MS: From the outset you said you were open to the idea of extending the project beyond the pilot program if you “get good results.” Considering your professional expertise, I’m assuming you determined that your returns matched your investment. How did you make that call?

KG: Well, I actually liked some of the music! And I think the audience had a genuine response to some of it as well (again, I wish audiences would be less polite!). And I think another true test is that many of the pieces have had repeat performances—more than I can keep track of at this point. These repeat performances were initiated by the music directors taking the pieces from the orchestra that premiered them to other orchestras they conduct. I think this is a pretty solid vote of confidence. And I have the impression that many of these composers were not even known to the conductors when we started the project. So I feel like we have moved the state of the art forward. I loved overhearing audience members say, “Hey, that wasn’t the usual thing—that was really good music! I wish I could get a recording.”

My next hope is to be able to find a way that the musicians unions can enable us to get recordings or downloads of live performances to the audiences. So many people like this music and want to hear it again—but they can’t right now. Perhaps something like Instant Encore is the key. I’d like to be able to take home a CD with me! Or a URL at least!

MS: Speaking of recordings, commissions are not something you get to take home with you and hang on the wall. What do you feel you’ve gained personally from the experience so far?

KG: The interaction with the composers and the music directors has been a great gift. And there is nothing like sitting in a first performance when I like the music. I’ll never forget the first performance of Kenji Bunch’s piece Leichtenstein Tryptich: I felt like I was sitting in that fast car with the wind in my face and my hair flying—taking in every note at 100 mph! Remember when the audience used to demand a repeat performance, right then and there, of a new piece of music? (I don’t either; it was 150 years ago!) I would have liked that for some of these pieces. That’s the true test!